|
|
|
Jewish World Review Sept. 13, 2005 / 9 Elul, 5765 The case for Judeo-Christian values: The feminization of society By Dennis Prager
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As a result of the repudiation of Judeo-Christian values, we are witnessing the ascendance of the feminine in Western society.
There are two reasons for this. One is the overriding belief in equality, which to those who reject Judeo-Christian values means sameness. Judeo-Christian values emphatically affirm the equality of the sexes. In fact, given that the creation story in Genesis proceeds from primitive to elevated, the last creation, woman, can easily be seen as the most elevated of the creations. Every man knows how much a good woman helps him transcend his animal nature.
Judeo-Christian values do not conflate equality with sameness. But the Left rejects any suggestion of innate sexual differences. That is why the president of Harvard University nearly lost his job for merely suggesting that one reason there are fewer women in engineering and science faculties is that the female and male brains differ in their capacities in these areas. A secular liberal who advocates affirmative action based on sex, Harvard's president nevertheless also has — or had, until his humiliation at the hands of his faculty — a belief in seeking truth.
And the truth is that men and women are profoundly different.
One of these differences is that women generally have a more difficult time transcending their emotions than men. There are, of course, millions of individual women — such as Margaret Thatcher — who are far more rational than many men; but that only makes these women's achievements all the more admirable. It hardly invalidates the proposition.
Far more common than Margaret Thatcher's rationality was the emotionality of the women jurors in the Menendez brothers' trials. All six women jurors in the Erik Menendez trial voted to acquit him of the murder of his father (all six males voted guilty of murder). A virtually identical breakdown by sex took place in the Lyle Menendez trial for the murder of their mother. The women all had compassion for the brothers despite their confessions to the shotgun murders of their parents.
To say that the human race needs masculine and feminine characteristics is to state the obvious. But each sex comes with prices. Men can too easily lack compassion, reduce sex to animal behavior and become violent. And women's emotionality, when unchecked, can wreak havoc on those closest to these women and on society as a whole — when emotions and compassion dominate in making public policy.
The latter is what is happening in America. The Left has been successful in supplanting masculine virtues with feminine ones. That is why "compassion" is probably the most frequently cited value. That is why the further left you go, the greater the antipathy to those who make war. Indeed, universities, the embodiment of feminist emotionality and anti-Judeo-Christian values, ban military recruiters and oppose war-themed names for their sports teams.
A sentiment such as "War is not the answer" embodies leftist feminine emotionality. The statement is, after all, utter nonsense, as many of the greatest evils — from Nazi totalitarianism and genocide to slavery — were quite effectively "answered" by war. (Virtually every car I ever have seen display the bumper sticker "War is not the answer" was driven by a woman.)
The response of one of the leading women professors who attended Harvard President Lawrence Summers' talk aptly illustrates this point. As The Boston Globe reported, Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, 'I would've either blacked out or thrown up.'" It is difficult to imagine a male MIT professor, even another leftist, walking out of a lecture and saying that he had to lest he vomit or faint.
In the micro realm, the feminine virtues are invaluable — for example, women hear infants' cries far more readily than men do. But as a basis for governance of society, the feminization of public policy is suicidal.
That is one reason our schools are in trouble. They are increasingly run by women — women with female thinking moreover. Such thinking leads to papers no longer being graded with a red pencil lest students' feelings be hurt; to self-esteem supplanting self-discipline as a value; to banning games such as dodge ball in which participants' feelings may get hurt; to discouraging male competition; to banning peanut butter because two out of a thousand students are highly allergic to peanuts.
In a masculine society governed by Judeo-Christian values (which include a masculine-depicted and compassionate G-d), feminine virtues are adored and honored. In a feminized society, male virtues are discarded.
Then both sexes suffer.
Just one more consequence of the war against Judeo-Christian values.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Dennis Prager hosts a national daily radio show based in Los Angeles. He the author of, most recently, "Happiness is a Serious Problem". Click here to comment on this column.
© 2005, Creators Syndicate
|
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
